Continuing with the “movie list,” here is
number six of the ten films that most shaped my life. These are not my
favorite films. They are the movies I’ve seen that have had the
greatest influence on my thinking, my character, my life. Some are favorites
that I enjoy watching over and over again, which you can tell as you read each
entry. Try to think of your own experiences with films and how they influenced
the course of your life. It makes life more interesting to be aware, as you
live it, to know how things such as books and films and magazine articles
alter your path in significant ways. Sometime last year the Sunday
NYTimes “Arts and Leisure” section had a piece on how difficult it is
to think of a movie that may have changed history. The only movie they could
think of was a silent film by D.W. Griffith, "Birth of a Nation," which had a
scene about the KuKluxKlan that the author believes changed national thinking
about the KKK. How silly. Each of the ten films listed here changed my
history, and if I had not seen them, I would not have helped change history in
the ways that I have. Films don’t move masses. They move
individuals who move masses.

8. “Fantasia” (1940) The first movie I
ever saw was a “Buck Jones” western, at the “OperaHouse” on Sunbury Street in
Minersville, Pa., where I was born four years earlier. The second film I
remember was a Nelson Eddy, Jeannette McDonald warbler, "New Moon," also 1940,
at the Hollywood Theater in Pottsville, a few miles away. My parents took me
to see "Fantasia" about the same time, but I recall it was at the other
Pottsville Theater, the Capitol. What an amazing movie, with cartoons set to
classical music! It was my introduction to Beethoven’s Sixth
Symphony, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Bach’s Tocotta and
Fugue and Mickey Mouse as The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. I’ve
watched it countless times over the years and believe it was part of the
foundation of my love of classical music. You can get it on videotape, but if
it shows up on a big screen, take your kids.

* * * * *

1. “The Ox-Bow Incident.” (1943) This is
the movie that most changed my life, instilling in me a fear of injustice that
is produced by lynch mobs. That came to be one of my distinguishing
political characteristics. As you will notice I am attracted to the defense of
those who nobody else will defend. My mother took me to see this when I was
seven years old and I even remember sitting near the rear of the Borough Park
Theater in Brooklyn, N.Y. Henry Fonda is part of a posse chasing men who
killed a rancher in the course of stealing some of his cattle. The thieves,
including Dana Andrews, Anthony Quinn and an old man, insist they did
nothing wrong, but after a quick tree-stump trial in the woods, they are
pronounced guilty -- with Henry Fonda voting “not guilty” -- and hung. On the
way back to town, the posse meets a man who tells them the rancher was not
killed at all, but was alive and well. The men who had been hung were innocent
after all. I cried bitterly, not only in the theater, but for many nights
thereafter. For years it came back to me in dreams. I can’t watch it when it
shows up on late-night television. I hate lynch mobs.

2. “Rashomon.” (1950) There are several
foreign films I saw as a boy that made me think of how different people were
in other parts of the world. "Rashomon," from the Japanese director Akira
Kurosawa, was about the universality of human nature -- the
elusiveness of truth everywhere in the world. There are four people involved
in an event that occurs in the middle of a forest in 16th century Japan. There
is a nobleman, his beautiful consort, a bandit, and a bystander. There is
conflict, a sexual episode between the woman and the bandit, and a murder. The
heart of the film consists of the same event played out four different ways,
according to the recollections of the four participants. This troubling film
taught me that there is no such thing as objective fact or pure
objectivity and built upon the lesson of "The Ox-Bow Incident." It made
it easy for me to see how Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill told the truth,
although their stories were 180 degrees apart. It also enabled me to
appreciate the conflicting stories of President Clinton and Kathleen Willey.
People sometimes remember what was in their mind at the time of a
stressful situation because it really was in their mind.

3. “An American in Paris.” (1951) There
is no motion picture I’ve watched more than this MGM classic musical, easily a
hundred times without exaggeration. Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron in a love
story that made me dizzy when I first saw it in raging adolescence (15). The
music is George Gershwin, my entry point to classical music. If I had to have
one movie on a desert island, this would be it. It is flawless. There is no
scene in it that is less than the others, no number I can decide is my
favorite of all. Oscar Levant is priceless in a supporting role. George
Guetary’s “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise,” stoked my raging adolescence
with every step. Gene Kelly plays a GI who stayed in Paris after the war to
learn how to paint. When he sees Leslie Caron in a smoky nightclub, he is hit
by the old lightning bolt, and pursues her until the movie’s glorious finish.
When she asks why, if he says he is such a great artist, he is not famous, he
asks her to be patient. “Civilization,” he says, “has a natural resistance to
improving itself.” In the years that followed, whenever I’ve been discouraged
about my progress in moving the world in the direction I wish it to go, I
think of that line and why it must be so.

4. “The Big Country” (1958) Another
picture that I can watch at least once a year, never tiring of its strong men
and beautiful women of the old west against gorgeous scenery and magnificent
music. Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston are protagonists, with Chuck Conners
thrown in for added manly tension. At another level there is the conflict
between two older men, Burl Ives and Charles Bickford, ranchers who fight over
the water of the Big Muddy. Jean Simmons and Carroll Baker are the beauties.
Some critics saw this superb western as a metaphor for the Cold War, with Ives
representing the proles, Bickford the capitalists. You can bear this in the
back of your mind, although I didn’t see it at first. The scene that most
affected me, telling me it was okay to be a leader even if no one would
follow, was Bickford riding into Blanco Canyon alone, when none of his men
would follow him to what seemed certain death. Charlton Heston finally said
“what the hell,” and the rest came along too. It sounds like a man’s movie,
but it plays to all genders and ages.

5. “Laura” (1944) I was only eight when I
first saw this mystery/romance, but that was enough to make me a life-long
fan. It featured Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews and Clifton Webb and Vincent
Price and Judith Anderson. It isn’t the mystery that shook me up, but the
romance. Gene Tierney is on my all-time list of gorgeous movie ladies, a very
classy lady. I, of course, identified with Dana Andrews, who plays a detective
who probably came from a working class family much like mine. While the high
society types are sipping their wine and chewing on canapes, Andrews is
playing with a handheld pinball game while he investigates “Laura’s” murder.
What knocked me out was that he winds up getting the classy lady once
he finds out she has not been murdered after all. Impossible dreams can come
true and in Laura there are two in combination. Throughout this era, there
were hundreds of movies where the shopgirl winds up with the worldy man of
means. This one was for me, the son of a coalminer. The theme song can still
make me dreamy about Genie.

6. “The Grapes of Wrath” (1940) I was only
four when this Henry Fonda flick hit the silver screen, and I rather doubt I
saw it then, but did see it the first of many times before I was 10. Fonda was
my maternal grandmother’s favorite actor, not least because he almost always
played a fellow who tried to help the poor folks and bravely confronted social
injustice. (Note he also stars in Movie #1 on my list, “The Ox-Bow
Incident.” “Grapes of Wrath” is a Great Depression story, about
down-and-out Okies leaving the dustbowl in search of the
land-of-milk-and-honey in California in a rickety truck. They encounter ups
and downs along the way and find the going rough even when they get to
California. The scene that hit me hardest, as a little kid, takes place in a
highway diner where they stop to buy half a loaf of bread, as I recall. One of
the little Okie kids asks a waitress for a penny candy, because that’s all he
has. She looks at the ragamuffin and sells him a candy, while two husky
truckdrivers look on waiting to pay their bill. They tip her a dollar, with
one telling the waitress that he knows the candy she gave the kid cost a
nickel. As the men walk out, she shakes her head and smiles: “Truckdrivers!”
From that moment, it’s a film moment that still occasionally inspires me to
sudden impulses of generosity and a definite bias toward the Teamsters Union.

7. “A Night at the Opera” (1935) This Marx Brothers picture was made
the year before I was born, but I discovered it via my Uncle Vince, my
mother’s younger brother, the same fellow who introduced me to baseball,
chess, classical music and a lot to do with politics. He was a left-winger who
never quite forgave me for becoming a Republican. In my teenage years, the
humor of the Marx Brothers absolutely convulsed me. I could not get enough of
it after seeing this first of several the boys produced. My closest friend,
Leslie Nathanson, and I would get the NYTimes to see where in the city a
theater was playing a Marx Brothers film. I remember trekking from Borough
Park in Brooklyn to 96th Street in Manhattan one Saturday, and literally
rolling in the aisle with laughter. I’ve seen all the films a dozen times, but
the “Night at the Opera” -- with Harpo suddenly selling peanuts and popcorn
down the aisle of the Met, while the orchestra broke out into “Take Me Out to
the Ballgame” -- was the craziest of all. Bob Bartley, editor of The Wall
Street Journal, once told me I had taught him “the art of the outrageous”
in presenting editorials traditionally written with lofty pomposity. It was
Groucho, Chico and Harpo who taught me.